Let’s just say I was making up for missing Nine Inch Nails as they performed in Salt Lake City the day I was en route to Nepal. Last night I joined 20,000 other Utahns sedately bobbing my head to four greying men (U2) playing familiar tunes from the radio. They’re officially ancient now, like the Rolling Stones, and they can charge whatever they want and say whatever they want on stage and people will (myself included, Mr. Kneejerk) buy into it. Bono, the frontman and lead ego for the band, has made a habit out of antics and political preaching during his shows, and since there doesn’t seem to be quite as much discontent in Ireland any more he’s turned his powerful influence (zombie mind control) to a much wider and more beneficial cause, ONE. During the concert he spent an interlude educating on povery and hunger and urged the audience to sign up on their cell phones with the ONE.org petition. Bono has been in the news quite a lot, leading a charge for our wealthier nations to forgive the debts of the world’s poor and struggling third world countries. The idea is that their debt has overwhelmed them and they end up spending more on the interest than they do on health care and education. These countries are primarily in Africa where poverty and AIDS are thinning the population like genocide, and ONE believes that by pulling together a bit we can turn back the torrent of misfortune.

Mt. Everest draws in the most adventurous and heroic climbers from around the world, but perhaps some of the most daring and defiant challengers to the ascent are locals from Nepal. The most famous and arguably most accomplished Nepalese climber was Babu Chiri Sherpa, who set many climbing and endurance records on Mt. Everest. He was intimately familiar with the remote region of Hades above Everest base camp, but was taken into the icy underworld in 2001 as he fell to his death in a deep crevasse. Another venturesome Nepalese climber named Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa predated some of Babu’s bold expeditions and had bright prospects for many legendary feats. Before his death at the age of 23 in a high-elevation avalanche in the Fall of 1996 he had already summited Mt. Everest five times, four of those without supplementary oxygen. On one expedition he made a statement for the pride of the Sherpa people by ascending the full extent of Mt. Everest wearing traditional dress (a chuba) and relying solely on the rarefied air of 29,000 feet and beyond. He was also part of Scott Fischer’s expeditions, including the catastrophe of Spring, 1996. He survived, but he couldn’t dodge misfortune much longer.

Looking out the window today I see the powder white snow glistening in the fiery orange hues of an inter-mountain sunset. What I’m really thinking is that I’m so glad I’m inside where it’s warm, because it has been awfully cold here among the baby mountains of northern Utah. We’ve gotten intermittent flurries of snow, just enough to let me know for sure in the mornings that it is cold and I’m freezing! The elevation here is only around 5,000 feet, which is remarkably close to that of Kathmandu, but you’d better believe they have a much different outlook on the winter than do we. As I may have mentioned before, Nepal sits at a northern latitude similar to that of the state of Florida, America’s swampy, humid home to crocodiles and college kids gone crazy. That state is primarily a flat land mass at low elevation, which serves as a welcoming mat for ferocious tropical storms. Kathmandu, land-locked and wedged up against the world’s highest mountain ranges, is at a similar latitude to Florida but a similar elevation to Utah. So just imagine if we followed the Jimi Hendrix principle where a six was a nine and Utah switched positions with Florida.